The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,7

fetuses in uteri, the same photos my mother had shown me when trying to explain how babies were made.

Ramon had spent several years in Argentina and Venezuela, and so a South American child made sense to us. He was a native Spanish speaker, and Guatemala seemed a viable option until we were told that night at Smith Chasen that Guatemala had also recently closed to Americans. The Hague Convention, which prevented organizations from paying women to have children, as well as the trafficking of babies over international borders, had been signed into U.S. law. Of course I didn’t want to take someone’s baby, someone who was being forced into placing their child up for adoption. I didn’t want to buy a child. And yet, I couldn’t help but think of getting here before those laws had started to affect intercountry adoption, in the golden age, when you lined up and paid your fees and got your fingerprints taken and your HIV tests, and then you got in a queue and when it was your turn, you left that country with an infant. And then that infant became your baby. And that baby grew into your child.

We had been cut off from Asian countries, where one was not to have ever had a mental illness—no antidepressants, not a single therapy session, not a one. But for me it was not reasons of mental health that precluded Asia; it was cancer. No. Cancer. Never. None. We were ineligible to become parents of children from an entire portion of the world.

Now Ramon and I passed through Richmond, its factories billowing black smoke, the large buildings almost New England looking in their stoic red-brickness, and I remembered a couple who sat next to us on that row of chairs at Smith Chasen, two men in beautifully tailored suits, crisp shirts with the faintest blue stripes, pastel ties. One was dark—Latino, I think—and the other looked as if he’d spent his first twenty summers on the bow of a boat in topsiders and Bermuda shorts, one knee bent as he looked out to sea, his blond hair feathering in the wind. The darker one raised his hand as we watched slides of orphanages flip by.

“I know that some countries don’t allow gay couples to adopt.” He cleared his throat. “What are the criteria for Russia?”

I want to say the social worker looked uncomfortable, that she shifted her papers and cleared her throat, but she did neither of those things. “I’m sorry no one told you this before tonight,” she said. “But we don’t take on homosexual couples for international adoption. Most countries will not consider it.” She smiled; her one concession seemed to be that she did so without showing her teeth.

The couple looked at each other, stunned. Then, as if on cue, they stood up and tried to leave the row with dignity, but they had to step over Ramon and me, who had not had time to stand and make room for them to pass. We tried to, believe me, but it was badly timed, and so we blocked them rather than cleared a path. When they finally exited our row, knocking several chairs imperfect, I began to cry. I sat down and put my head in my hands as I heard more rustling, the sounds of more same-sex couples exiting the room.

After they left, a single woman, also banned from parenthood, filed out, and then it was Ramon’s and my turn. No cancer, we were told. No matter how long it’s been in remission. Not for Asian countries. There was a ringing in my ears so loud, but I could not answer it. Ramon went to stand, but I jerked him back into his seat. I would not leave the room.

_______

Perhaps, we thought, someone with experience could explain this process to us. A colleague gave me the name of an acquaintance—their kids were in school together—a lawyer facilitating adoptions who had adopted two Russian children, simultaneously, five years previously.

The lawyer was kind enough to meet me for coffee uptown. It was just after she’d had a hair appointment and as she approached my table, I could see her hair was rather purple, like an elderly person’s, and, because it was combed back and sprayed high, away from her face, it revealed two slits at each ear, where her skin had been pulled too tightly and then resewn.

“This is how you get the best ones,” she said, meaning the children, after we’d said